Issuu

Volume XXVIII, No. II

April 2022

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MAGAZINE The Undergraduate Magazine of Columbia University, est. 1890

Editorial Board CLAIRE SHANG, CC ’24, Editor-in-Chief SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23, Managing Editor KAT CHEN, CC ’24, Digital Editor TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23, Publisher DANIEL SEIZER, CC ’22, Publisher HART HALLOS, CC ’23, Illustrations Editor MADELEINE HERMANN, BC ’23, Illustrations Editor ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor BENJAMINE MO, CC ’23, Literary Editor ELIZA RUDALEVIGE, CC ’23, Literary Editor SAMANTHA SACKS, CC ’22, Podcast Director Senior Editors GRACE ADEE, CC ’22 SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ’22 CY GILMAN, CC ’22 WILLA NEUBAUER, BC ’22 CHLOË GOTTLIEB, CC ’22 VICTOR OMOJOLA, CC ’24 ELIZABETH JACKSON, CC ’22 SOPHIE POOLE, BC ’22 NICOLE KOHUT, CC ’22 HAILEY RYAN, BC ’22 BROOKE MCCORMICK BC’22 LYLA TRILLING, CC ’22 DOMINY GALLO, CC ’23, Editor Emeritus Staff Staff Writers ALEXANDER AIBEL, CC ’23 MISKA LEWIS, BC ’24 COLE CAHILL, CC ’22 JUSTIN LIANG, GS ’24 ZIBIA CALDWELL, BC ’25 WILL LYMAN, CC ’23 IRIS CHEN, CC ’24 BECKY MILLER, BC ’24 MICHAEL COLTON, CC ’22 LEAH OVERSTREET, CC ’24 MARGARET CONNOR, BC ’23 ELLIDA PARKER, CC ’24 ANDREA CONTRERAS, CC ’24 ANNA PATCHEFSKY, CC ’25 CAT FLORES, BC ’25 MICHAELA SAWYER, CC ’25 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 DARIYA SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’23 JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER, CC ’22 MUNI SULEIMAN, CC ’24 ANOUK JOUFFRET, BC ’24 SONA WINK, BC ’25 KELSEY KITZKE, BC ’23 Staff Illustrators MACA HEPP, CC ’24 MAC JACKSON, CC ’24 HAZEL LU, CC ’24 VANESSA MENDOZA, CC ’23 SAMIA MENON, SEAS ’23 OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25 ROSALINE QI, CC ’22

AEJA ROSETTE, CC ’22 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS ’22 AMELIE SCHEIL, BC ’25 JACE STEINER, CC ’22 BETEL TADESSE, CC ’25 PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25 MAYA WEED, CC ’22 TAYLOR YINGSHI, CC ’25

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Vol. XXVIII

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. II

FROM THE STAFF Letter From the Editor Bwecommendations

Claire Shang The Blue and White Staff

4 5

Will Lyman

BLUE NOTES In Loving Memory Reading Riverside Park’s benches.

Justin Liang

The Scaffolded City Confronting New York’s sidewalk sheds.

Alexander Aibel

Aibel Relabels Regarding Columbia’s greatest failure. CAMPUS CHARACTERS Fergus Campbell Rachel Broder

Becky Miller Miska Lewis

10 12

Anna Patchefsky

Iris Chen

Zibia Caldwell

Skylar Wu

Andrea Contreras

ESSAY The Faces of GS The particulars of the School of General Studies.

Dominy Gallo

THE CONVERSATION Sharon Marcus On the stories we tell and the stories we don’t about the women who don’t quite fit in.

Michael Colton

HUMOR Dear Dante, Season 8

Cy Gilman

THE CROSSWORD Stations of the Cross

FEATURES Making Mischief Columbia’s history of minor mayhems. Between the Virtual World and Me On the corporeal experience of racism and the pedagogical possibilities of VR. ESSAY The Will to Party Getting from one side to the other. MEASURE FOR MEASURE Fonsphobia (Fear of Spring)

Cover by Hart Hallos / Postcard by Chloë Gottlieb, Hart Hallos, Daniel Seizer @theblueandwhitemag

theblueandwhite.org

@blueandwhitemag

Letter From the Editor E

arlier this month, scrolling through Elon Musk–owned Twitter, I came across some 2020 data on the subscription base of Harper’s Magazine. The oldest general-interest monthly in America, Harper’s is as magazine as it gets. Its readers, one-third of which are women, have been subscribed for an average of 10 years. Their average household income is $116,000; 46% hold postgraduate degrees. The replies were of muted, but general, shock. There seemed to be a confusion about who—and what—people think magazines are for. Technically, The Blue and White has been around since 1890, just 40 years after Harper’s founding. This is not to put us among such high company—though we did seem to be running ads for Harper’s in our hallowed pages in 1892—but to understand that as the American magazine has expanded, evolved, and experienced identity crises over the centuries, being a college magazine only compounds the challenges that come with the medium. In 1893 we declared ourselves “in every respect a students’ paper.” With a lack of further explication, it’s hard to say what that really means. In our earliest years, for instance, we often read like a propaganda effort to increase school spirit around athletics. And if you were to ask Blue and White staffers now, I think each would have a different answer as to why they’re on the magazine and what they think an undergraduate magazine—the official one, no less—ought to do, be, and look like. Like my predecessors, I’m not sure I have a completely cogent answer for you. But I think it all hinges on this lack of prescription, and on trying to figure out, as we go, what it is that unifies the disparate experiences of thousands of undergrads. One thing’s certain: We’re all here to learn every day, in some form. I’m of the mind that our April issue embodies this experience of learning something from every encounter. Our Blue Note writers shine light on places we might take for granted, examining dusty corners and excavating niches. Will Lyman meanders through Riverside Park, reading the dedications on its benches (p. 6) and Justin Liang ponders the history and future of the ubiquitous sidewalk shed (p. 7). Closer to home, Alexander Aibel has a crisis about the inconsistency of Columbia buildings (p. 8).

As the class of 2022 approaches graduation, four Campus Characters made the time to talk to our staffers. In these pages, Becky Miller dives into the mind of auteur Fergus Campbell (p. 10) and Miska Lewis chats with Rachel Broder about her food stand, farming, and family (p. 12). Apparently, the average Harper’s subscriber spends three hours reading an issue. If you have even a fraction of that, you can indulge in our longer-form pieces. In our Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Anna Patchefsky unearths accounts of the colonial-era mischief of Columbia undergrads (p. 14), while Zibia Caldwell writes of partying as a meaningful practice of self-care (p. 20). Iris Chen contemplates a VR project intended for its users to experience anti-Black racism (p. 16) and Andrea Contreras speaks to older adult GS students about what led them here (p. 24). This month’s four Conversations are all about understanding how the self moves through the world. In print, professor Sharon Marcus and Dominy Gallo discuss the relationship between literature, sexuality, and sexual violence (p. 28), and three more Conversations await you on our website. Finally, we wouldn’t be a students’ paper without literature—like the beautiful poem by Skylar Wu on page 23—and humor. Read until the end to find Michael Colton’s sage advice about scheming (p. 34). In 1893, an ancestor of mine declared that we would publish pieces that “not merely appeal to, but will merit the support of the students. We shall expect that support, not because of old age, of finely appointed offices ... but simply because we shall try to deserve it.” Over a century later, I’m working—and hopefully succeeding—at this same goal.

Claire Shang Editor-in-Chief

THE BLUE AND WHITE

Bwecommendations

In which Blue and White staffers valiantly attempt to balance erudition and eccentricity. Claire Shang, Editor in Chief: Black cherry Chobani. Hanne Ørstavik, Love. Sylvie Epstein, Managing Editor: The Dropout (Hulu). Fleetwood Mac, “Gypsy.” Tarini Krishna, Publisher: Priya Ragu, damnshestamil. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Daniel Seizer, Publisher: Severance (Apple TV+). Not having Covid. Hart Hallos, Illustrations Editor: shirtless sleeves. Madi Hermann, Illustrations Editor: Ingrid Michaelson, “Far Away.” Everything bagels. Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Season 4 (Netflix). Eliza Rudalevige, Literary Editor: Jos Charles, feeld. Leith Ross, “I’d Have To Think About It.” Grace Adee, Senior Editor: Rachel Khong, Goodbye Vitamin. Calling back my mom! Dominy Gallo, Senior Editor: Luvia Lazo, Kanitlow. Britney Spears, “Toxic.” Cy Gilman, Senior Editor: The 1978 Covent Garden recording of Peter Grimes. Leo Gilman. Chloë Gottlieb, Senior Editor: Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban. Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Are Friends. Elizabeth Jackson, Senior Editor: Bruce Springsteen, “No Surrender.” Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: Artem Chapeye, “The Ukraine.” David Ehrlich, “25 Best Films of the Year” Video Countdowns. Sam Needleman, Senior Editor: Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Victor Omojola, Senior Editor: Lingui, The Sacred Bonds (2021). Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story. The Row’s Spotify. Hailey Ryan, Senior Editor: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays. Cole Cahill, Staff Writer: Charlie Hickey, “Nervous at Night.” Zibia Caldwell, Staff Writer: Spring fur (faux). Hyacinth flowers as room freshener. Iris Chen, Staff Writer: Moses Sumney, “Don’t Bother Calling.”

MARCH 2022

Michael Colton, Staff Writer: On Cinema At the Cinema (Adult Swim). Margaret Connor, Staff Writer: Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister. Squirrels to the Nuts (2022). Andrea Contreras, Staff Writer: Patti Smith, M Train. Rhaina Cohen, “What if Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?”. Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Abbott Elementary (ABC). Turning Red (2022). Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, Staff Writer: Robert Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. Anouk Jouffret, Staff Writer: The Clientele, “Reflections After Jane.” Kelsey Kitzke, Staff Writer: Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House. Enjoying the sun. Miska Lewis, Staff Writer: June Jordan, Passion. The chocolate salted caramel cake from Hungarian. Justin Liang, Staff Writer: The Soft Pink Truth, Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?. Will Lyman, Staff Writer: Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties. X (2022). Charli XCX, Crash. Becky Miller, Staff Writer: Vince Staples, Ramona Park Broke My Heart. Rollerblading. Anna Patchefsky, Staff Writer: Willie Nelson, “Moonlight in Vermont.” Peanut butter and raisins. Dariya Subkhanberdina, Staff Writer: How I Met Your Father (Hulu). By the Way bakery’s coconut cloud cake. Muni Suleiman, Staff Writer: Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet’s Work In Community at the Morgan Library & Museum. Vanessa Mendoza, Staff Illustrator: Harry Styles, “As It Was” (Music Video). Oonagh Mockler, Staff Illustrator: Jóhann Jóhannsson, “A Sparrow Alighted upon our Shoulder.” Aeja Rosette, Staff Illustrator: Ivy Sole, Candid. Duckwrth, Supergood. Pink KN95s. Jace Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Deva Grace, Vocivos. D’espairsRay, Coll:set. Phoebe Wagoner, Staff Illustrator: spitballing. chums. wellness.

Illustrations by Brooke McCormick

In Loving Memory

Lover. On one bench I read and reread a beautiful, wrenching tribute to a deceased child. Other benchReading Riverside Park’s benches. es had plaques scratched with keys or otherwise BY WILL LYMAN vandalized. One bench had a paper that read “We’re n a meditative walk through Riverside Park, Hiring!” stuck over a plaque. The ad had disinteI came to the realization that a lot of people grated in the rain, falling onto the ground in wet, are dead. I was reading the small metal plaques white clumps. It reminded me that even memorials that commemorate various West Side characters, are commercial spaces. Later, on the Riverside Park performing a zigzag maneuver to examine each la- Q&A page, I found that each plaque cost $7,500. bel on the facing benches. I felt the weight of the With this information in mind, I reconsidered what tributes—that everyone had someone to remem- I had read. Some benches were birthday presents, ber, everyone had things they wanted to say. As I some were proposals, some were made out to dead read, I grew increasingly aware that the park was pets. These memorials were qualified by ration by V t vacant, save for an idle car on Riverside money, made more visible, mays u l an Il ess Drive from which white vape clouds be even more memorable, than spouted. other forms of remembrance. While it might’ve been approI thought of everyone who priate for me to feel some form didn’t have their own bench of grief in response to these or other tangible claim on memorials, I was mostly left the city, of all the loved ones with a feeling of dissatisfaction. who had no place to visit. The majority of the dedications The dedications noticemerely listed names and broad ably lacked most people’s explanations that the honorees occupations. I wasn’t surprised enjoyed the park, and that others that, in death, people didn’t now missed them. Generic phrasfind day jobs to be particularly es we inherit and imitate aboundpersonal. Artists were the exceped, commenting on courage or love tion. Such memorials cast the park as a place in sweeping, even clichéd, terms. “We of inspiration, for creatives to sit and absorb the know you're looking down on us”; “we won’t be the world around them. To seek out intensely personal same without you.” moments in a public backdrop: park benches, roofBut I struggled to come up with alternatives, for it tops, Low Steps at midnight. These places you go to is a difficult task to distill a life into four lines of text. be somewhere else. Reading many of the dedications, I learned nothing I love Riverside in moments. On sunny Sunday about the person concerned. I clung to any plaque afternoons—smiling at a dog, ignoring its owner. that was uniquely descriptive, that seemed to iden- On a Saturday in April, when I came across a band tify something about loved ones beyond the basic playing jazz to a crowd of passersby. I sat on the roles they occupied in another’s life: Aunt, Father, stone wall and watched people dance. I like to think

oza end aM

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES I have many such places—sunning at Silver Moon Bakery or stumbling into Suite on karaoke night and hearing a man in khakis belt “Lady Marmalade.” Times where it seemed that I had made a home out of the city. Most often, the dedications ended with a mention of their authors, a sudden appearance of a “Melissa” or a “Conan.” I’m reminded that the memorial isn’t for the dead. It exists for the people of the park—for people to sit among while they feed squirrels, for pilgrimaging family to visit, or for college kids to write about in their notes apps. Ultimately, it seems that the purpose of these dedications is to do exactly what they did to me— to give me pause, to make me feel both alone and surrounded in the park, to ask me how and where I’d like to be remembered. Above all, they exist to remind us of our shared experience—of gradually finding our places in this city, making connections to benches and asphalt pathways, and personalizing our experience of a place millions have passed through. Here are the dedications that I’ll remember: “JOEL GOLDBERG The man who loved mustard, Who was married to the woman who always had to be right.” “Little girl with blond curls holding my hand running on the wall, Climbing rocks and monkey bars, teetering on a two-wheeler, sledding on fresh night snow, Teddy loping alongside. Sweet unforgettable times. In loving memory of Hallie Leland Leighton”

The Scaffolded City

Confronting New York’s sidewalk sheds. BY JUSTIN LIANG

urely it must be classed among the seven wonders of New York, alongside the Empire State Building and the yellow taxi. But the iconicity of the former and the ubiquity of the latter cannot compete with that omnipresent seventh wonder: the unsightly sidewalk shed. In our own backyard, the spindly steel beams, green plywood cladding, and harsh fluorescent glare of these structures have most recently been foisted on the façades of Morton Williams and Lerner Hall. It remains the bane of residents in McBain. Venture into the rest of the city; one finds the same scaffolds inflicted on other unsuspecting buildings. Whether the humble walkup or the storied Flatiron Building, no edifice is immune from its clutches. Few know that this controversial feature of our urban landscape has its roots in Barnumbia history: One evening in 1979, Barnard first-year Grace Gold was walking with a friend on 115th Street when a chunk of masonry fell from the lintel of a Columbia-owned building, killing her. The tragic case of the falling brick, however, has a much longer history. Over a half-century ago, a man “killed by a falling cornice” was featured in E.B. White’s Here is New York.

“In loving memory of Herman Sands Here he sat and sunned and sketched Absorbed As buses and birds and birthdays flew by” “For George, who enjoyed the sound of silence. From Amy, who loved to listen with him.”

MARCH 2022

Illustration by Amelie Scheil

BLUE NOTES In a city as vertical as ours, all sorts of death and destruction rain down from the sky: poorly installed air conditioning units, say, or milder kinds of devastation, like the fecal matter of passing pigeons. But it is the falling brick alone that grants us New York’s seventh wonder. After the Barnard first-year’s death, the city council passed a façade inspection law mandating that all buildings six stories or higher be examined every five years; if the building failed inspection, a sidewalk shed would have to be erected until repairs were done. Landlords being landlords, many realized that it was cheaper to keep renting the sheds instead of shelling out for expensive repair work. The façade inspection law is responsible for what is today almost a million feet of sidewalk sheds. The average tenure of these sheds is over nine months, but they can sometimes be in place for years on end. Columbia declined to comment on the average tenure of its own sheds, but the scaffold outside McBain, for instance, has been up since 2018. The city’s record, though, belongs to a shed in Harlem that has stayed up for 28 years. These structures are the unsightly barnacles that mar the face of our city, blighting street fronts, impairing visibility, and obscuring natural light. While ostensibly for safety, the sheds themselves can be unsafe: In 2020, a pedestrian was killed by a collapsing scaffold. Other dense cities with old buildings such as London or Paris manage to keep pedestrians safe without so much structural flotsam. What then is to be done for New York? One solution is legislative: Councilman Ben Kallos has proposed a law that would force landlords to complete façade repairs within six months and dismantle sheds within a week thereafter. An even more fanciful proposal has been to inspect buildings remotely, using drones. Still, another approach is to rethink the scaffolds: Urban Umbrella, a company that traces its origins to a city-sponsored competition in 2010, offers an alternative with translucent roofing and elegant steel arches. But it is fourfold more expensive than the traditional sidewalk shed, meaning its user base is limited to an upscale clientele. Or, instead of unsightly temporary sheds, why not make them permanent? It’s a whimsical idea, but a covered sidewalk has its proponents: Some cling to its inviting shade under the hot summer

sun or take shelter in a rainstorm. For the street vendor, it is a perfect place to set up shop. For the homeless, it can be the only place on the street they call home. From the arcades of Venice to the shophouses of Singapore, covered walkways are a staple of many vernacular architectural traditions. Perhaps the answer will one day bring us back to the beginning. The Grace Gold Memorial Scholarship, in honor of the Barnard freshman killed by falling masonry, is awarded annually to a student pursuing the fields of architecture, engineering, or urban design. It is a small but meaningful gesture of hope that New York may one day join the ranks of the world’s other great capitals, finding a way to keep pedestrians safe without obscuring the face of the city. That, then, may be a seventh wonder truly worth its name.

Aibel Relabels

Regarding Columbia’s greatest failure. BY ALEXANDER AIBEL

o be quite honest, though I’ve been here for over two years, I haven’t entered most buildings on campus. I would estimate I’ve crossed not even one-third of Columbia-owned thresholds. Even from the small sample I have encountered, however, I can assure you that Columbia has made finding one’s way to one’s classroom virtually impossible. Each time I go to, say, Dodge (art) or Dodge (sport), I’m forced to track down clues like a pirate hunting for treasure, except the treasure hasn’t been renovated since 1977. Most painful of all is that for some reason, the geniuses behind the school for geniuses decided that none of their floor labels should make sense. I have never—not even once—entered a Columbia building on the first floor! As an East Asian Languages and Cultures major, I often find myself in Kent. I rush in for class every day—on the third floor. Now that I think about it, my second-floor class is below-ground. This is an academic problem of the highest order: I need the mental capacity to speak Chinese and sit through class, and the added confusion over what floor I’m on more than certainly diminishes my grades. Schermerhorn … Don’t even get me started … Okay, I started. Why do I enter on the second floor? Maybe because I’m entering a second-rate build-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES Illustration by Betel Tadesse

ing. Are there really three floors below this one? Even if there are, why not call this one—oh, I don’t know—the first floor? Or even the ground floor? Just calling it “The Floor You’re Entering On” would be more helpful. And I am no architect, but I know I could design an extension that’s slightly easier to find than Atlantis. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I slither down the hallway trying to shove open double-doors that look like they were designed for a nuclear power plant. I might even be in a different building by now, but who knows? This maze is kinda fun; but now I am late for class. Pupin, Pupin, Pupin. Manhattan project, Manhattan shmunkjet! They should have spent a little less time researching nuclear reactions and a bit more time making sure that I don’t have to enter on floor five. Classrooms are on floors two and three,

MARCH 2022

floors from which one would expect a nice view; but no, they are below the ground and windowless. That’s why I got a B in Fro Sci. No windows + confusing floors = Aibel is unable to do physics … and the other three sciences I did not do too well in. Thanks to the International Affairs Building, I’m also no longer a Poli Sci major. I’m not even concentrating in Poli Sci. Why is the fourth floor ‘street level’ and the sixth floor ‘campus level’? Does Columbia’s U.S. News ranking elevate this school above street level? I might graduate next year, but if I don’t, it’s the floors’ fault. I know my friends would be cooler and my life would be far more fantastic if I could enter campus buildings on Floor One. My brain’s too feeble for any other system, and so is yours.

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS

Fergus Campbell BY BECKY MILLER

Illustration by Aeja Rosette

he night of the tree lighting—a glamorous Columbia tradition where the whole university gathers on College Walk to watch someone flip a switch—Fergus Campbell, CC ’22, put on a show of his own. Capitalizing on the foot traffic near Low Steps, Campbell and his friends set up a projector and streamed previews of his experimental web series, “Sankyo Stream,” onto an unobstructed stone wall. They passed out “Sankyo Stream” stickers to tree-obsessed spectators. The stickers came free with a shameless advertisement: “Come watch all seven episodes of ‘Sankyo Stream’ in Dodge 511 at 8 p.m. tonight! Bring your friends!” At 8 p.m. inside Dodge 511, a small student theater that a professor of Campbell’s had lent him for the night, every seat was filled with friends, fans, and film geeks (I belonged somewhere in between those three categories). As the writer, director, editor, and creator of the project on-screen, Campbell, clad in the “Sankyo Stream” t-shirt handmade by a friend, gave brief opening remarks before the lights dimmed. Campbell thanked the viewers, his extensive network of Columbia student collaborators, and his creatively involved roommates and companions. After a round of topical trivia (in which

no player could name all three Haim sisters), seven consecutive episodes of Campbell’s precise, beautiful, and evocative mind-map unfurled before the audience. The theater was dark and lively with human reactions, just as a true cinematic experience should be. (Campbell told me later that he hasn’t watched a movie on a laptop in ages because it’s impossible to simulate the undivided attention one gives to a film in a theater.) I remember thinking in Dodge that this Columbia audience was particularly attentive, present, spirited—I immediately fell in line and cheered, laughed, and marveled with the cool seniors. There was no other way to react to a Fergus Campbell screening. Campbell began making “Sankyo Stream of Consciousness” as a freshman. His vision was clear: He’d venture on an experimental, interview-based quest to find and interview Paul Thomas Anderson. The final product is an adventure narrative, interspersed with dream sequences and preluded by an iconic title-sequence homage to New York. Campbell shoots about a quarter of the show with a Sankyo MF-606 camera, a retro brand of Super 8 film cameras which acts as the namesake for both the show and Campbell’s main character.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS Campbell uses the character of Sankyo—a refracted version of himself—to explore obsession, motivations, desires, and “how something can be about someone and at the same time have nothing to do with them, how the subject can be central and at the same time, completely marginal.” The show is a collaboration between artists of all kinds at Columbia and beyond—the original music, dialogue, acting, dancing, choreography, and design are all contributions Campbell’s friends and peers make for free. He admits his college-long project “masquerades as a club.” He spearheads the organization with stylized visions of cowboy vogue, fish guts, faux French film noir sequences, ballet numbers, live student concerts, animated rebirth, and cityscapes in tow. Paul Thomas Anderson was the obvious choice for the prize of Sankyo’s treasure hunt—since the show is simultaneously dead serious and completely parodical, the stereotypical “favorite director” of film kids simply had to be Sankyo’s ultimate get. Campbell himself only truly idolizes two of PTA’s movies (Phantom Thread and Punch Drunk Love, three if you count Licorice Pizza as an afterthought), but he adopts PTA’s directorial precision and ideological depth like someone who can quote Tom Cruise’s deranged on-stage monologue in Magnolia word for word. The difference is that Campbell has opinions, and Magnolia does not do it for him. Campbell loves Oliver (he was cast as Fagan in high school); he is a pop music devotee and religiously listens to Lana Del Rey (on Apple Music, of course); he is bored by the role of Maria in West Side Story (although the Spielberg remake was gorgeous); he’s a big fan of The Weeknd’s new album Dawn FM (but does not find its radio-show gimmick original). Campbell is so self-aware that these takes hold no element of bullshit or appeal to popularity—he’s happy to advocate for cool shit and uncool shit, and even cool shit that’s so overdone it becomes uncool. If he’s into it, he’s into it uncompromisingly. Campbell’s easy self-possession leads to aiming high and usually scoring. On a whim, he coldcalled The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman asking if he could help him out in any way. Now he’s fact-checking Schulman’s book about the Oscars and working as his assistant. In Episode Seven of “Sankyo Stream,” Campbell snagged interviews

MARCH 2022

with a MoMA film curator, mayoral candidate and New York personality Paperboy Prince, and the founders of a queer surfing collective. “People are mostly down to give creative support,” he told me, sipping on a beer at Max Caffe. “It’s also luck,” he added, mentioning the recording studio near his hometown in Northern California that he and a friend borrowed from their high school English teacher to record a forthcoming EP. With a knack for uncovering the small-but-special underbelly of every place he goes, Campbell’s style is distinct and cohesive across his music, his web series, his animations, and his photographs. A short film he wrote and animated mid-quarantine, Telling George, leaps out at you with the style of a Wes Anderson movie; but its languid rhythm, satisfying sentences, and imagined location (a sunny cave-mansion) are entirely Fergus Campbell. His on-brand, unreleased EP is dedicated to the idea of places: The lyrics are “observational, diaristic, but mundane.” His already-public songs, “Sister” and “Californiana” (both written and sung by Campbell with Vimeo music videos), contain strikingly short, detail-laden lyrics, clearly written by someone who expertly captures moments with a camera; listening to his lyrics feels like watching vivid, intentional vignettes flick across your mind, a measured slideshow that Campbell is controlling. After the last two “Sankyo Stream” episodes come out this spring and summer, Campbell plans to use other avenues to fulfill his visual urges: filming a docuseries about his friend and pop star Maude Latour, writing a feature film, squeezing songs and words and images out of the places he can’t stop thinking about—Marfa, Texas; Argenton, France; his beloved New York. When I asked him over a dry chicken sandwich if the country accent he adopts for a song about Texas on the EP was supposed to be funny, he explained, “It’s a little bit pastiche but I’m also completely serious about it.” As with everything Campbell creates, even if it isn’t dead serious, some part of it is in fact absolutely dead serious, which is what makes it both so magnetic and so fun. As an auteur, he is at once central and marginal; as a senior at Columbia, he is at once remarkably talented and refreshingly unpretentious. People can’t help freak out about the guy—he is so singular and visionary that it doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t like Magnolia.

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS

Rachel Broder BY MISKA LEWIS

met Rachel Broder last spring, when chance brought us to the same discussion section of our 200-person Anthropology of Climate Change class. Later in the semester, we found ourselves planting flowers together at Barnard’s Earth Day event—a nexus quite fitting for us both. The third time I saw her off of Zoom, she offered me a slice of freshly baked sourdough. As I chewed, I reflected that my humble quarantine-era foray into the bread world could not compare. However, those two months gave me the knowledge to objectively assess that Rachel’s bread had the perfect crust and crumble. When I inquired about her secret, she attributed cooking the loaf at an 85% humidity level. At that moment, I knew she meant business. Six months later, sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, she tells me about her relationship with food, her thesis, and growing up in her grandparents’ kitchen. When the waitress comes to our table, my order in hand, she chats with Rachel, asking about her day. “It’s like I live here,” she said later, laughing. “My housemate works here, so I’m definitely here a lot.” Rachel’s voice effortlessly rises above the Hungarian hubbub: a melody of first dates, study sessions, and coffee grinders. Per her recommendation, we drink orange blossom tea mixed with apricot jam. As I take my first sip, she asks if I like it and explains that her grandmother constantly drank the concoction. After our conversation, she texts me: “The first question when you walk into one of my family member’s houses is if you want tea.” With every sip, warmth radiates through the china cup and hints of apricot pollinate my taste buds. As we chat, I am struck by how strongly I can relate to her fondness for cooking, particularly for others. Rachel has a gift for carving out

spaces for the practices—and the people—she loves, despite the relentless pace of Columbia and New York City. Rachel tells me that her mother emigrated from what is now Ukraine to the United States at 22. Her grandparents soon followed, making a home in New Jersey within walking distance of their daughter. It was with her family, especially her babushka, that Rachel discovered her love for cooking. A big part of her childhood, she told me, was “not even really cooking with them, but just watching them cook, and having them show love through food and through preparing food.” Just like her babushka and dedushka, Rachel infuses and creates a little bit of home in every dish she makes. She smiles while remembering, as a child, watching her grandparents’ hands at eye level as they cooked. When those same hands served a table full of extended family, all under one roof for a shared meal, the idea of food as a form of love clicked for the first time. “I saw how food can bring people together to have a conversation, maybe make things less awkward,” she said. Growing up and building a home away from home, Rachel’s throughline has been imparting joy through food. The other month, Rachel baked a citrus cake for her friend’s birthday, leading to her first-ever commissioned cake of the same kind: Earl Grey, jasmine tea, chocolate, and blood orange cornmeal olive oil cake, with raspberry jam filling, brown butter cream cheese buttercream, and dried blood oranges as adornment. Hearing her speak, I think about how few college students get the chance to have a cake like that on their birthday, to experience the thoughtful and celebratory nourishment Rachel believes in. Though Rachel grew up going to her grandparents’ house nearly every day, Mondays were the most sacred. Joined by all of her cousins, she sipped black tea swirled with her babushka’s sour cherry preserves and ate crispy potatoes with tangy cucumber salad. Years later, Rachel would

THE BLUE AND WHITE

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS reimagine these dishes for the Queens Night Market, an open-air summer food festival that features vendors of all cuisines with no dish sold for more than $6.. The gig involves being on your feet for six hours straight in the muggy July heat. The chance to witness a variety of cuisines in one place for an evening of cultural exchange, however, was one Rachel couldn’t imagine missing out on. To her, summer nights are now for sweet and sour borscht, sticky syrniki, and soft blintzes stuffed, lovingly, into delicate containers. As one of only 100 vendors, Rachel treated the Queens Night Market as a test kitchen to experiment with Ukrainian food. Despite her family heritage and palette for olivye, Rachel hasn’t always gravitated towards cooking within the Ukrainian tradition. As a child, her first-ever dish was blueberry muffins, placed neatly into a basket with pieces of pineapple. Her grandmother usually served cut fruit with breakfast, and seven-year-old Rachel wanted to do the same. “The pineapple looked like giant chunks of butter,” she explained, laughing at the image. When the pandemic hit and her family’s most sacred Monday Dinners were put on pause, Rachel began cooking more than ever. FaceTiming her grandmother, she tried her best to replicate the dishes from her childhood, undeterred by the lack of formal measurements. Using her taste as a guide, she made the recipes she remembered. “Making the food, and smelling it, was a very intense experience,” she said. As someone who had always conceived of food communally, living with two roommates who ate at different times and couldn’t share the meals—“doing this project by myself,” as she described it—felt “weird.” When summer 2021 came around, she channeled this practice toward a food stand, aptly named Monday Dinner, that was at once a small business run with her best friend and mother, a homage to her grandparents, and a testament to her incredible cooking and hard work. “The menu was different every

MARCH 2022

Illustrations by Jace Steiner

week, except for borscht. Syrniki was my favorite, it’s like a pancake-cheesecake hybrid. It was a breakfast thing my grandparents would make for special occasions,” she explained. On her feet from six o’clock to midnight,, Rachel served her memories to others, allowing them a taste into her childhood. Her grandparents’ support never wavered. “When I was at the Night Market, my grandparents would stay up until midnight when the market would end,” Rachel remembered.“They’d call and be like, ‘How did it go? What sold well?’” While she’s unsure if she will continue with the stand this coming summer, she’s spent the semester holding cookie fundraisers, most recently for nonprofits in Ukraine, and finding a similar sense of fulfillment as a Food and Agriculture intern at New Roots Community Farm in the Bronx. A collaborative farm founded to “create a more vibrant, just, and equitable local food system,” New Roots has everything from greenhouses to beekeeping. Rachel spends her days doing a little bit of everything: maintenance, weeding, harvesting, seed-saving, helping with Tuesday farmers markets and their Community Supported Agriculture farmshare. After working there for a year, Rachel was inspired to incorporate the farm into her senior thesis, which is a research project about New Roots and “growing food as a source of healing and servicing disempowered communities.” Over the summer, she’ll be conducting oral history interviews with farm members and will create a research project that is as much an academic study as it is a cookbook. “I want to tell people’s stories through their food,” Rachel told me. It’s a concept that she seems to have been immersed in since birth. “There’s such a disconnect right now in the food system and I want to do my best to close the gap,” she added. In making these connections, Rachel has built a web of meaning and care with everyone she encounters. You can’t help but become entwined in it the moment you try one of her cookies, buttery and sweet in their simple, skilled perfection.

F E AT U R E S

Making Mischief

Columbia’s history of minor mayhems. BY ANNA PATCHEFSKY

n 1771, Columbia underclassmen Thomas The New York Times printed an article about the Shreve, Isaac Abrahams, and Cornelius Bogert “curious volume,” which kept its legacy alive. Acstole a set of teacups from another student’s room. cording to the Times, the teacup thievery showed For their petty crime, the trio was grounded to that “the modern college boy comes honestly by the College Hall of King’s College, a schoolhouse, his sign-stealing propensities.” It took the book’s library, dormitory, and landmark of 18th-century contents as fact and concluded that it offered an lower Manhattan. unvarnished (albeit tea-stained) look at pre-revoOne imagines these teacups stacked along a win- lutionary college life. dowsill overlooking the Hudson River. Like a firstIt was not just kleptomania for which colonial year’s collection of cheap liquor, the teacups scream Columbia punished its students—dishonesty was “I’m newly independent. I drink.” In reality, the their primary peccadillo. Shreve, Abrahams, and crime was less devilish—the teacups contained but Bogert may have been penalized for stealing teatea. Perhaps the bounty was more symbolic, with cups, but the University faulted the trio most for these Columbia trouble-makers “denying they knew anything of longing for tokens of their cinnathem.” Shreve’s frequent appearmon-spiced nights. ances in the Black Book’s pages The teacup incident gives us a earned him the title of “most hint that, over the course of 250 culpable” among the three, as years, college behavior hasn’t his track record of deceit apchanged much. Thanks to The proached pathology. Shreve was Book of Misdemeanors Of King’s the mischief-making monarch College, New York, Shreve and of campus, consistently peevCo.’s misconduct is sealed in a ing the administration with his tightly-bound leather book and absenteeism. His distinct style tucked away in Columbia’s Rare of roguery and its predictable Book & Manuscript Library. stunts tired even the author of Illustration by Oonagh Mockler The Book of Misdemeanors, the Book. When Shreve was also called the “Black Book,” is reprimanded by the Board a compendium of accounts from January 1771 to of Governors—alongside his buddy Bogert—the August 1775 documenting Columbia’s earliest mis- Black Book does not give the “different heinous ofchief-making days. In 1931, Milton Halsey Thom- fences” committed by the Columbian the dignity of as, editor of the first published edition, described a full account. Likely there were too many to list, or the original leather volume as College President else their severity was overwhelming. Months latMyles Cooper’s imperfect attempt to enforce a er, on Dec. 23, 1771, the Board of Governors lifted rigid system of Anglican discipline. With entries his consequences in full and Shreve could return to logged by Cooper, university instructors, and other class. Given his penchant for truancy, this ChristColumbia presidents, it upholds the record-keep- mas present probably seemed more severe a penaling tradition of Cooper’s alma mater, The Queen’s ty than his previous sentence. College, Oxford. On Saturday, Aug. 5, 1771, Cornelius Bogert deAfter 1775, when education ceded to revolu- cided not to come to class. Rather than memorize tion, it seemed as though Columbia’s accounts of the first three chapters of the Iliad—a task required petty crimes and roguery might disappear into of all King’s College boys—Bogert absented himthe historical void. (When the school reopened in self. Basking in the sweltering August heat, he was 1784, Cooper’s log was not revived). But in 1901, surprised when President Cooper arrived on horse-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S back to reprimand him. Dreading classroom tasks that awaited him, including translating the Aeneid into English, Bogert refused to return. According to the Black Book, Bogert later declared that “he did not know” he had been sent for. The Board of Governors, not fond of his deceit, caught him in the lie, but eventually, the record would show, even he was “absolved.” Bogert and Shreve reappear in the book on May 4, 1772, a big day for Columbia’s mischief-making scene. On April 28, Beverley Robinson, an indolent peer, had “spit in the Cooks’ Face, kicked, & otherwise abused him.” On May 4, his punishment was issued: to stay within the confines of the famed College fence, commissioned by Cooper to keep college boys in and prostitutes out. Despite the magnitude of Robinson’s offenses, the judgment committee could not neglect Bogert and Shreve, who had skipped prayers and forgotten their homework. For these sins, additional exercises were ordered, at the behest of the president. Apparently reformed, Shreve would go on to become a prominent reverend of an Anglican church in Nova Scotia. These three were not the only boys with klepto tendencies. James Douglass, perhaps seeking to practice his John Hancock, stole eight sheets of paper and a pen-knife. For this, he was reprimanded before the entire student body. After the porter stripped him of his gown he was made to kneel and read an “Acknowledgement of his Crime.” Columbia’s disciplinarians denied Douglass his uniform cap and gown for an entire week. Why was the pen-snatching Douglass subject to public humiliation while Robinson, who beat up the campus cook, was merely detained within campus walls? The Black Book contains no notes about the background of these boys. Was Robinson tantrum-prone and overindulged as a child? Did Douglass lack pen and paper of his own? Administrators similarly did not explain, within the book’s pages, how various punishments were decided; punishment, seen as necessary, did not invite scrutiny. The Black Book brims with whimsy. On July 9, 1772, Jacob Remsen was doomed to translate four chapters of Jean Heuzet’s Selectae e Profanis—a social history of English life including a wealth of travel accounts, diaries, maps, and charts—for skipping class “under pretence of sickness.” In fact, Remsen had skipped school to fish. (He had also punched a peer the week before.) Remsen’s misdirection is

MARCH 2022

complemented by the book’s other examples of attempts at escapism. On June 17, 1773, James Davan locked himself in his room when summoned by the president, and the ensuing hunt “caus[ed] four Doors to be broke open before he could be laid hold of.” Eventually, he was found in the room across from his own, which he had accessed by way of a false key. Davan later reappears in the Book for stealing a “very large Quantity of Vine out of the president’s garret.” Some of these crimes are so antiquated they resist translation. Yet, even today, we recognize their motivating impulse. One hundred and eighty years after the book’s last entry, history professor Dwight Miner directed attention back to the Black Book. Miner, who earned the sobriquet “Mr. Columbia” for his immense love for the school, gave a lecture on colonial campus life to a packed auditorium of undergrads, and was met with roaring laughter. One student fell out of his chair. Modern students made punchlines of their colonial forebears to contrast college experiences across centuries; yet, in joining a tradition of humor and lightheartedness on a campus known for its rigidity, Miner’s audience may have had more in common with their mischievous ancestors than they would’ve liked to imagine. The boys of the Black Book are not famous. They have no apparent effect on our lives today; their prose inspired no literary movements and their theses supported no scientific theories. Nothing more than the classmates of Alexander Hamilton, they remain uncelebrated Columbians. They have no building dedicated in their honor; cursive scribble in a tea-stained book is all the archive of their time here. Still, these conspicuous, once-condemnable moments of their college years live on in Columbia’s library. Glimpses into the quotidian elements of 18th-century Columbia reveal a history more tangible than the exalted narratives of Columbia’s consolidation that we are so accustomed to hearing. The Black Book defies our institution’s myths of excellence, and honors, instead, the profound—at times, severely punished—plainness of every student. From its pages, we learn that college has always been a place for trouble-making. Since the beginning of American education, pupils and disciplinarians alike have understood that where there are rules, there are misdemeanors. And while not everyone can be the next great alum, all of us can make a little mischief.

F E AT U R E S

Between the Virtual World and Me

On the corporeal experience of racism and the pedagogical possibilities of VR. BY IRIS CHEN

ithin the world of virtual reality, it takes all of three minutes to become Michael Sterling. Look down and see that you now wear jeans and a knitted turquoise sweater. Raise your hands and look in the mirror across the room. You now inhabit the body of a Black man. Michael Sterling is the protagonist of 1,000 Cut Journey, the brainchild of Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn, an Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia. In the visceral 12-minute virtual reality film, which first premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, users experience three pivotal moments of racism in Sterling’s life. First, playing with blocks in elementary school, the teacher implies that you are aggressive and will hurt the other children. Later, as a teenager, you wear the same outfit as a wanted Black man. The police stop you, forcing you to kneel with your hands up. Finally, when you are 30, you walk into a job interview and the hiring manager walks to the white candidate, asking him if he is the interviewee from Yale. He is not—you are. Most non-Black people are likely familiar with these circumstances as a spectator rather than as a victim. They might feel bad. Yet as Cogburn emphasized, feelings without action rarely bring about justice. Much of modern racial discourse is subject to her criticism: It tends to minimize the schema of insults, violence, and discrimination with calls for solutions like ‘racial justice’ that are amenable to intellectual discussion but fail to prove their relevance in the situations that 1,000 Cut depicts. The juncture between conceptual and corporeal experiences of racism is one of the linchpins of modern racial scholarship. In Between the World and Me, writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates articulates racism as the “visceral experience” of violence unleashed upon the body, one that spectators are incapable of understanding. Virtual reality has the potential to reconcile the conceptual and corporeal. Over the past two years of Zoom teaching, various VR projects have begun to redefine Columbia’s milieu. Parixit Davé,

the director of Columbia University Information Technology’s Emerging Technologies Consortium, collaborates directly with professors. Last year he worked with Dr. Brent Stockwell, a professor of biochemistry, to create a teaching space in VR. “It forces you to be present,” Davé noted from his half of our Zoom call. Walk away from the device or check another browser and Stockwell would be able to see. In other instances, dental students can learn to inject novocaine in a virtual world with haptic feedback tools that build muscle memory; surgeons can overlay a VR-facilitated CT scan over the body before cutting open real patients. There are pedagogical possibilities for children as well: Davé’s seven-year-old daughter who wanted nothing to do with the solar system has become “hooked” to a space VR program—in part because it lets her throw objects on different planets and in part because she can customize her avatar. “It’s a reflection of who she wants,” he said. Our Stories Were Our Lives

avid Kalinoski’s orange hoodie is the first thing I see when he logs onto our Zoom call. It is only later in our conversation that I become aware of its significance. Kalinoski, Cogburn’s former Master of Social Work student, explained that “My mom would forbid me from wearing a durag. I would rarely go out of the house with a hoodie, not because I didn’t have hoodies, but my mom was just like, ‘You cannot be having hoodies as your daily wear.’” Kalinoski’s relationship with his mother recalls Cogburn’s TED Talk, during which she discusses the days after the death of Trayvon Martin. Many of her pregnant Black friends felt anxious about bringing their children into the world. She, too, has a young Black son, and wonders when strangers will stop “oohing and ahhing” and begin to perceive him as a threat. During the research process, the team often

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S sat down over dinner to share their experiences, mapping them onto a storyboard to create a blueprint for Michael Sterling’s life. Kalinoski worked on 1,000 Cut Journey as a research assistant from the fall of 2016 into the spring of 2017. “Our stories were our lives,” he said. When he was a college student in Philadelphia, Kalinoski was accosted by police officers for “walking down the street, basically.” In the moments that followed, he was slammed against the hood of a car and forced to the ground. “There are folks within this last decade, and just historically who are Black, that do not make it out alive,” Kalinoski said, matter-of-factly. He considers himself lucky. Despite putting his hands in his pockets—a “mistake,” he added—the police officers did not do more than command him to stop moving. Dominic Cathey, a 2017 graduate of the School of Social Work, also worked on 1,000 Cut Journey as a research assistant. He described a similar experience in which five police officers entered his home, assuming he was a suspect they were pursuing, and put him in handcuffs. “To be in that moment and not feel heard and not feel seen, similar to what Michael Sterling experienced, was traumatizing to remember.” Like Cathey’s Black friends and family, Michael Sterling also knows the familiar retinue of life-preserving habits that Black parents teach their kids: to keep your hands in visible places if stopped by the police, to avoid driving in dim spaces or wearing certain items of clothing in public. For that, he feels real. Cathey remembers growing up and facing different treatment as one of the few Black people in all-white classrooms where “there was this hypervigilant observation of Black bodies.” In a more recent experience, he described how he applied for a job with other classmates but was denied despite his similar, if not superior, qualifications. Anecdotal experiences like Kalinoski’s and Cathey’s are subjective, but they are supported by empirical evidence. In New York, for example, 48% of arrests from 2006 to 2019 were of Black people, who make up only 24% of the population. Such data contextualizes Kalinoski as just one of countless Black individuals brutalized in a similar manner by the police. Likewise, Cathey’s hiring experience is common among Black men—for instance, Black men with criminal records are hired statistically less often than white men with similar

MARCH 2022

backgrounds. In creating 1,000 Cut Journey, the team understood that experiences similar to their own exist across the Black community. While attempting to define the Black experience in three instances may seem reductive, America’s racial caste system subjects Black men to a sheath of comparable threats. As Cathey explained, these are experiences that Black people have across their isolated, individual spheres. In such tense situations, Kalinoski described how “you’re just your pulse, you’re just your bodily reactions.” He continued, “There’s so many expectations of what to do in that moment. You’re not thinking clearly of anything. You’re just trying to survive.” Oftentimes, violence against Black Americans is justified by the flimsy defense that perpetrators feel ‘threatened.’ However, without having experienced police brutality themselves, such individuals fail to understand that these behaviors are defensive responses to external threats: instinctive and uncontrollable. 1,000 Cut Journey fills this experiential gap. Preliminary evidence shows that physical reactions in a virtual world parallel those of our world; heart rates speed up, hands become sweaty and sometimes limbic systems go into “overdrive.” While one’s mind may know that the virtual world is not real, the body is almost certainly fooled. Scholarship shows that visualization aids performance and informs behavior. And indeed, virtual reality experiments that focus on color blindness and age gaps show that users who inhabit color-blind avatars become twice as likely to go on to help color-blind people. In Experience on Demand, Stanford psychology professor Jeremy Bailenson describes another virtual reality program that stimulates tree-cutting; afterwards, subjects used 20% fewer napkins to clean up a spill. 1,000 Cut Journey endeavors to prompt similar behavioral changes within the domain of race relations, allowing bystanders to experience racism on a physiological level. Creating the Journey

ogburn had a working relationship with Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, be-

F E AT U R E S

Illustration by Rosaline Qi

fore virtual reality’s involvement in the project. After securing a Magic Grant from Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation, she reached out to him. Over the next several months, the team flew back and forth between their lab at Columbia and Bailenson’s lab at Stanford where they tried out different VR programs. In one, the team went through an obstacle course. In another, they endured an earthquake. “That really gave me a foundation for what was possible, for somebody else to put on the headset and experience Michael Sterling at the

time,” Cathey noted. When the project first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018, most of those who experienced 1,000 Cut Journey were white liberals, Cogburn’s target demographic. In talks on the project, she often emphasizes the difference between not being racist and actively being anti-racist. The boundary between these two states is most apparent among white liberal audiences who wash their hands of racism but benefit from its infrastructure. At Tribeca, Kalinoski watched users try the experience. Some cried; others emerged with blank stares. Kalinoski admitted that it was always interesting to be faced with “white tears.” He was unsure if he should “coddle” them or “just let that ride out.” As a researcher, he had a responsibility to maintain his neutrality, but even so, he could not “remove” his skin and was aware that just by being there, he could influence the way users answered his questions. “I'm more or less elected to let it ride out, let that sink,” Kalinoski said. “If I can experience this at any given moment, at any point of my life, then as part of the social agreement to doing this experiment is, you sit with that and you process and do the work.” Indeed, it often falls upon oppressed individuals to comfort dominant groups when they encounter

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S injustices that upset their curated state of stability. But ultimately, the project of behavioral change must be self-instigated. It must persist continuously through not just isolated pockets of self-awareness but persistent, behavioral change. As Cogburn, Kalinoski, and Cathey all make clear, 1,000 Cut Journey can be a vital instigator for change but it takes a “willingness to still go ahead” after having uncomfortable moments to make such change enduring. VR at Columbia and Beyond

onsidering Columbia’s commitment to classical ideals and aesthetics, the metaverse perches rather awkwardly atop the shoulders of Virgil and Milton. On campus and beyond, serious conversations about virtual worlds are rarely entertained for long before heads begin to shake and obvious criticisms unfold. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that few of us know what to make of this new frontier. And if history is any indication, VR’s logistical developments will outpace the public’s ability to discuss them cogently. It is comforting to find people like Cogburn, Cathey, Kalinoski, and other like-minded researchers and educators constructing the virtual world. Currently, VR’s power structure is monopolized by gaming corporations that have the resources and capital to invest in networks large enough to accommodate communities of new users. There are few fresh eyes in such a consolidated industry. Cathey recalls the limited array of hairstyles, clothing, and even skin tones that the 1,000 Cut Journey team was able to choose from. Because they had limited familiarity with VR, Cogburn’s cohort was better equipped to identify these shortcomings. It becomes even more important to include interdisciplinary perspectives like Cogburn’s when considering that developers have potentially unrestricted possibilities for creation with little oversight. VR world-building no longer becomes an arena for creative freedom but a moral cesspool where developers possess dominion over users’ psychological development. Consider then what it means to create an avatar, perceived as

MARCH 2022

an autonomous actor who willingly enters their position of deference. Without the presence of social workers, psychologists, philosophers, doctors, and other professionals devoted to the healthy, equitable, moral development of human societies in spaces of virtual-world creation, one cannot help but be concerned about the future of human connection. The current virtual–real-world binary that defines VR discourse implies that people are either in the metaverse or out of it—that the metaverse will bifurcate the world. However, proponents of this view forget that privilege in the real world buoys one’s entrance into a virtual one. And once one enters the virtual world, real-world crises persist. Perhaps conceiving of virtual worlds as an appendage to real ones will allow for a better understanding of the possible merits and harms of the medium. It has been four years since 1,000 Cut Journey premiered. Now, Cathey works as the senior director of student management of Excellence Community Schools, a charter school network in the Bronx. 1,000 Cut Journey brought Cathey into the virtual world; in his new academic space, he prioritizes computer science education—something he sees as equally important as the arts and traditional curricula. As an educator, he admires Cogburn’s teaching style. While Cogburn was the one who facilitated their research conversations, she was able to create a space where “our voices got to be the experts in the room.” Cathey tries to replicate this environment when working with his students—to see them as “knowledge keepers” and “knowledge developers.” As VR usage increases, he is optimistic that some of his students will be sitting at the table. If 1,000 Cut Journey proves anything, it is that some structural issues in the real world have too many burrs for real-world solutions alone to meaningfully resolve. Virtual spaces offer creative, experiential solutions that can fit between the spikes. Speaking to Cogburn’s democratic, pragmatic approach to the project’s creation, Cathey explained that “when you relinquish control of the outcome, something magical gets to happen.” VR programs like 1,000 Cut Journey propose the benefit of doing just this—setting aside biases against virtual worlds, long enough to be able to entertain their other face.

E S S AY S

On the Will to Party Getting from one side to the other. BY ZIBIA CALDWELL

Content warning: This essay contains references to sexual violence. he first party I remember going to was at the Marriott on Canal Street. I was thirteen and very excited to be going to a hotel party. The little I knew about hotel parties I’d gleaned from a conversation the summer before with a girl a year older than I was. She was a Brandy Melville model with long, perfect brown hair. She told me she went to a lot of hotel parties, and she talked a big game. So I went into this one expecting the glistening affect assigned to people onto whom one has projected one’s insecurities, and was a bit shocked to walk into a damp double bedroom that smelled vaguely like clams and Washington Square weed. When I arrived, there had already been two noise complaints and the speaker was broken. It was the summer of “Bodak Yellow” and someone was playing it on their phone and enthusiastically rapping along. Before we were kicked out (because we were always kicked out), I remember very clearly standing in front of the sliding pane windows and looking out at the sun setting on Tribeca. It was June or July and probably only seven or eight, and the sky had gone full Michelangelo. I paused and photographed it.

What is the will to party? Where does it come from? Within what systems of thought and need does it operate? Thrown out with the recycling, floating with the dark blue-black of the sky at 4 a.m, is the question of why I do this and not something else.

I started writing this essay with an earnest, even academic intention: to explore the social phenomenon of partying in the way that people explore the social phenomenon of the opera; to conduct an ethnography of how Columbia students party, why we party, and where we do it. I wanted it to be sage, because I’ve been to lots of parties and acted perfectly outrageous and I would like to believe that it’s made me weathered in some way. I don’t think it has. No matter how I twist it, I’m still young and fresh like a 5-a.m. city street, recently rained on, the sky above still a very light blue. I started partying in a more intentional way about three months ago because something happened to me that made me not want to be in my body. My body was the site of a breach in trust and I felt marked by it. People talk about trauma as something that we carry around inside of us, and I felt that acutely. And sexual assault is a particular kind of trauma; it is in you, on you, with you, you are it. It is not like the memory of the cruel thing that X said to you, or the time that you saw Y, because in those instances you walk away and the aggressors stay in their place. You associate the location of the trauma with the event of the trauma, and the location is not yourself. You walk by the spot where Z broke up with you, where X told you they could never forgive you, and you shudder and avert your eyes, but then it ends. When the location of the cruelty is your own body, it can feel like an end is entirely out of reach. It sounds concerning to say, but parties have helped me in this way. I never went to another hotel party, and I don’t think I ever will. My subsequent partying differed wildly from its genesis, and that night at the Marriott was not an accurate gloss on what was to come. I found myself at clubs in the Lower East Side, at raves in the Bronx, at house parties on 72nd Street, in increasingly bizarrely decorated brownstones (think oversized plaster sculpture of two truncated knees) in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, in the bowels of the Financial District, and on quiet corners in Fort Greene. I would throw parties in my own home and others at venue spaces and I’d attend more ticketed

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S events than I care to admit in print. I have learned to understand the night as a machine. It hands us back to ourselves the next morning diced, crushed, in our composite parts. We reassemble; like children at the dinner table, we blindly bat a chubby finger at the velveteen crush, try to find what was yesterday whole. Coming up empty, we have no choice but to improvise. I think most people have some kind of release. I know someone who makes French onion soup, another who cuts her split ends off with a nail clipper, another who runs the length of Manhattan on Saturday mornings. Others just do drugs, and others meditate. And others, like me, find release in partying. I like to think that I party in a way that is somehow sophisticated or legitimate, but that’s probably to be determined. Illegitimate partying is marked by insecurity, by needing to prove something about yourself. Many of the parties I went to in high school were illegitimate. I wasn’t going for myself, I was going because I wanted to seem intrepid, and this was New York, and we all felt an intense need to “make a name for ourselves.” I can remember, with a clarity that always clings to particularly uncomfortable memories of social events, an almost debilitating sense of being out of place at those parties. I recently went to one such illegitimate party. I have felt awkward and unpopular many times in my life, but feeling that way at a party is always visceral in a different way. The party promises a singular and collaborative togetherness, and I think it almost always makes good on that promise—at least, for some. At every party, there is usually one group experiencing that togetherness, though what proportion of the guests are in that group is another question. But to stand outside of that togetherness is deeply uncomfortable. So deeply uncomfortable I wonder if this might be explained, in part, by something biological, something rooted in our history as pack animals. Parties make certain promises to us, and these promises are highly conditional. This is what makes going to a party exciting—one wonders at these promises and their intricate social conditions. When the social conditions on which these promises rest align, we find ourselves in a social nirvana. When the social conditions on which these promises do not align, or rather, align destructively, we find ourselves in a very special kind of hell.

MARCH 2022

Seeking out social nirvana is a norm of, if not a prerequisite to, human experience. And yet partying (or even worse, partying too much) has a deep connotation of shame. We find ourselves at a familiarly puritanical crossroads: The will to party is clearly a natural one, and yet in our cultural understanding it is inexorably, irredeemably tied with guilt. I seek to unhook guilt from our idea of parties. I propose a vision of parties as a space of healthy undoing, a radical form of self-care. I have a recurring dream about a party that I went to about three years ago. The apartment is sprawling, seems to go on for miles and miles. I drift from room to room. Through the walls, I can vaguely hear the song “Everything Now” by Arcade Fire. As I move through the apartment, I pass what feels like exhibit after exhibit of my friends in love. Platonically, romantically, personally enraptured. In one room, they dance and play guitar and piano; in another, they play dress-up by the bed; in another, they sit on the floor, eating Chinese take-out. It is a fantasy of sociality in this place of no needs. Everything that we could possibly want has been thought of and provided. Every song that comes on is exactly right, precise, tailored to the shifting mood. This party floats in my mind as a case study for everything I think a good party can be: a site of ecstasy. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek “ekstasis,” to stand outside oneself, and it is this particular valence of the word that I am referring to here. A good party is a trap door. An Irish exit which leads out of your life and into what your life is not. A note in my phone dated a week or so after the assault: “I am where the world isn’t. Sun touches my leg and I know it is my leg. I know it is mine but I feel so small inside myself. Like a child cloaked in the long trench coat of a father. I went to the aquarium yesterday and wanted to be on the other side of the glass.” In the months when I felt that my body was a thing that had been hung over me like a sheet caught in tree branches, the only body I felt I had came from walking out of the trap door and into a party. The assault had orphaned me from myself. The party gave me admission out of that body and allowed me to map out a new one, a body that could hold what happened to me and also get through a day. In this way, the party is a means of transportation: It is a ferryboat, and it deals in time. That is to say, the party can give time back to you.

E S S AY S There is a feeling that comes out of a good party that I have never been able to define. Perhaps this is because it feels so much larger than I am. It comes on imperceptibly; I was late, you called and asked to borrow my jacket, I left my keys at home, I got there and I couldn’t find you, and then, suddenly: a feeling of walking out of a thicket and into a clearing. The world and I are moving at exactly the same pace, like a mirror image. It is like being in love, only it is not directed at any one person or thing, but rather the fact of all these people and things, the light in the window across the street, your nimble hands gesticulating, bodies jumping in and out of one another like the staccato of cicadas, the smell of tobacco and cake. Every gesture and word that is directed at me feels like a gift. Admittedly, the will to party, despite its myriad benefits, is of dubious validity. I wanted to leave my body because being inside it was unbearable, and while the party alleviated that sensation temporarily, it could not make it go away. Aside from partying, most of what helped me to function again was my community. My argument here is not that the party is a means to an end, but that it is a means. A good party will never heal your wounds completely, but it can begin to show you why your wounds might be worth healing. In the mess of bodies I get jumbled like the words of an introduction. This feeling: the opposite of being asleep and the opposite of being awake. I stood on a chair looking for you and I only saw the back of your head, maybe 10 feet away from me and talking to someone else, but I felt you, felt you, felt you. Skinless, veins swinging around me like hair, the morning appeared to me like a sandbar and I let myself get washed up on it. When I woke up, I was alone on the beach where I first learned to swim. It felt like August in the middle of the winter and I swear I’ll never be able to understand how that can be. Even hangovers, and maybe this is an optimistic vision, can be an invitation for reinvention. Hangovers act as a final (and embodied) step in the emotional transition parties offer. Every time I go to bed past 4 a.m. I wake up after two or three hours of sleep feeling vaguely nauseous but somehow full of adrenaline, and begin to clean. As I do, I replay the highlights of the evening and consider what needs doing in the coming day. I load myself back into myself. However, within this process, I find that

something is always gained. I can never put things back exactly as they were, and the next day when I am coherent again I am slightly changed, as if the weather inside of me has shifted a few degrees, as if I had come home and found all my furniture moved a few inches from where I’d left it. Six years old at the window of my bedroom, I remember screaming at my babysitter that I wanted to go home. I remember her looking at me with an expression of genuine confusion and saying, “But darling, you are home.” I did, in fact, know I was home, but I was talking about that other thing home can be: metaphor. What I was too young to articulate then but acutely understand now is that the body is more of a home than a house could ever be. The body defines our comfort with the world, our ability to hold or let go of things, to know when we have had enough, to know when we have had too much. After the assault, I felt my body had been stripped of its capacity to hold itself. I felt I had come home and found no one there. It was only at parties, when I was delirious enough to feel nothing except my heart beating low in my stomach, that I began to recover a sense of my body. The magical power of the party is its almost uncanny ability to get you from one side to the other. The more I went out, the more I slowly began to realize how wrong I had been, how I had mistaken my body for an emptiness that was not my own. The ending to this piece eludes me. Everything I have been taught about writing encourages me to deliver a clincher, but I find myself aphasic. I cannot tell you how the story ends, because I haven’t found out yet. Today is Thursday, the beginning of the weekend. The ferryboat laps at the shores of the coming hours, twinkling. Is it the River Styx or the East River? Impossible to tell. Here are the two things I know: I am wide open like a radio without a dial, and all I can see in front of me, stretching in every direction for miles and miles, is Illustration by Rea Rustagi open ocean.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MESEAURE FOR MEASURE

Fonsphobia (Fear of Spring) BY SKYLAR WU Spring is the most plump, most miserable mushroom to ever grow out of my eyes. Teal and yellow scurry for billions of years, crash on the internal walls of memory, scatter into caterwauling kittens, wailing children; tears spring into a pedal of moldy oranges. Damp heat, they say, is the mosquitoes’ crying ritual, cries today into tomorrow. What does it avail? My pericranium still burns scarlet red, chaotic like the inside of a bird’s egg. Let it puncture clamorously, its nutrients outflow— make this spring more spring than any of the past.

Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner

MARCH 2022

E S S AY

The Faces of GS

The particulars of the School of General Studies. BY ANDREA CONTRERAS

n the liminal space of Lucas’ Zoom screen, I saw that he was not sitting in his adolescent bedroom as I was. He was in a nursery: cradle in the corner, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, pale green walls. During my first semester at CC, I peered daily into the seemingly distant, middle-aged world that belonged to Lucas, to whom I’ve given a pseudonym. Sometimes, his wife would come into the frame to rest their baby onto his lap. He would participate in our breakout room conversation while absentmindedly stroking the head of his child. On the other end, my awkward cap-andgown photos were fresh off the printing press. My knowledge of Lucas’ life would never extend beyond this casual observation. I often speculated about his past—was he a Navy Seal? Professional chef? Former Broadway star? The ambiguity of the “nontraditional General Studies student” Columbia boasts went unexplored by my classmates and I, substituted for a vague admiration for his intrepid curiosity and frequent participation. Unlike me, Lucas had little skepticism for the course material, read every text with zeal, and shared candidly. The semester ended, and while I had heard the cries of Lucas’ child and noted his opinions on postcolonial Algeria, I was no more clear on General Studies, the project for adult education, or what had encouraged him to return to school with a bunch of abashed 19-year-olds like me. Every semester brought new grown-up faces, and each looked different. The more I puzzled over how to describe and qualify the non-traditional GS student body, the more I realized that they are a population that is uncategorizable; anything but general. Here are five such stories from older adult GS students. ANTHONY

met Anthony in Joe Coffee in Dodge Hall the Tuesday before spring break. He speaks quietly in a subdued Auckland accent, and wears Air

Forces with highlighter blue and orange laces surely inspired by Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Customizing shoes is a hobby he likes to share with his children, who are 12, 9, and 6 years old. Now that Anthony is a student at GS, he has new activities to share with them: homework on the dining table, conversations about history. Inspired by Ancient Civilizations, a class taken to fulfill the Global Core, he’s currently on a mission to direct his oldest son’s attention to the Egyptians and Nubians in his social studies class. The academic subjects he contemplates with his children range from archaeology to war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. “It’s like having a conversation with a friend,” he told me. Anthony began to pursue his first degree, in part, as a statement to his children: It’s never too late to do anything or to learn something new. In part, of course, it was for himself. After years of traveling and photographing the world, starting his own digital production company, raising three children, and getting a divorce, the 47-year-old wanted to try something different. Growing up in New Zealand, young Anthony had no particular love for school. The allure of skateboards and cameras always held more sway than that of chalkboards and pencils. Once he secured a job, no social pressure from those around him kept him from dropping out of high school. Decades later, as his children were growing up, Anthony began wondering how to emerge from the domestic sphere. It was then that Anthony heeded his therapist’s advice to return to school. What started off with an academic writing class at Harvard’s Extension Program became deep exploration of language, leading to the linguistics degree he is pursuing here. Anthony is now one of the many proverbial Front-Row Question-Askers. He takes any class he’s interested in. He’s invited his GS classmates over to barbecues at his apartment. He goes to Mel’s. Although he doesn’t have a clear path for post-graduation, Anthony tells me that education

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY inspires every aspect of his life—and leans in to explain just how. He is an artist, he says, who feels inspired by the flaky blue paint on a building, and now he wants to paint the world. VEENA

eena’s birthday was the day after we spoke. She was turning 30, and the guest list was overflowing: her University Writing professor, her mom friends, her 20-year-old friends in Barnard and CC savoring their first semesters of independence. She hadn’t expected to make any friends, so it was all a welcome surprise. Some she met from her brief stint at the Columbia Spectator, while others unceremoniously slid into her DMs (a result, perhaps, of her seamless ability to blend in as a CC student). The birthday party would be a merging of her “double life.” In one, she’s at the doctor with her son, talking to her landlord, rushing to her daughter’s school. In the other, she’s competing for unpaid internships against 20-year-olds, listening to CC students’ Hinge stories, dealing with a midterm grade, talking to The Blue and White. Veena sometimes feels a cognitive dissonance in processing her two lives—or at least that’s what her psychology classes would call it. Veena decided to major in psychology to understand her own experiences. She spent her childhood dreaming of a career in theoretical physics while being nurtured by a cancer-researcher mother and first-generation Indian family. Pregnant at 20, Veena dropped out of college to get married and abide by a traditional notion of feminine domesticity. Her decision to retreat into matrimony was not a sixth-wave post-feminist statement on motherhood, but the result of a period of intense psychological manipulation that culminated in a conversion to Mormonism. “It’s a lot,” she warned me a few times, between hesitant laughter. I didn’t doubt her. In her era of pious domesticity, Veena was perpetually restless. She wanted to leave the house, volunteer, study, work. As soon as her husband moved out, Veena enrolled in community college—which eventually led her here. Initially, she struggled with guilt over the periodic absences from her Connecticut home that her academic pursuits required. Now, however, these feelings

MARCH 2022

are overrun by a feeling of pride in her accomplishments, and the knowledge that she wasn’t meant to be a stay-at-home mom. She definitely doesn’t look the part, with her small but bold tattoos decorating her arms, her dry, witty sense of humor, and an unapologetic openness. Veena’s daughter has a Columbia sweatshirt she is obsessed with, a symbol of the impact Veena’s education has had upon her children. Before, Veena’s daughter used to talk about growing up, getting married, and having kids; now she talks about going to Columbia like her mom. Veena doesn’t “do things halfway.” When she’s in, she’s all in. She’s writing a book right now, a deal made after an online reader serendipitously sent her Spec article to an editor. She’s raising three children, she’s graduating this summer, she responds to DMs, and she’s wearing sequins to her birthday party. PHIL

hil’s favorite word is fuck. He swears in a bold Italian-American accent, lending his speech a boisterous enthusiasm—a quality that rushes to the forefront when we talk about GS. He told me it’s because he’s a Leo. It makes perfect sense to me—Columbia’s mascot is a fucking lion, after all. He is sitting in his recording studio on Zoom with me. His location matches his look, which is evocative of a Sicilian DJ Khaled. He pauses occasionally to take a puff of pain medicine, a necessity after a nearly fatal accident in 2018. Last semester was his first semester back at Columbia since his medical leave, and his first time navigating campus as a disabled individual. He is taking it as it comes. At 40, Phil still wants to be a celebrity. He almost became one, during a lucrative career in sound and audio engineering that landed him Hollywood award nominations. His trade school certification in audio engineering came after he heard a radio ad on Hot 97. A self-described asshole/football player/hotshot/bully/troubled-teen high schooler, he found the program a welcome alternative to college. The audio world was fun, but maybe too fun. He wasn’t ready for the high-intensity party scene in the post-production world, and he was soon caught in a whirlwind, costing him his job and sending him to rehab. Phil told

E S S AY Illustration by Taylor Yingshi

me that in the process of getting sober, he identified that a major driving force of his addiction was a feeling of existential dissatisfaction: He felt that he had never reached his full potential. Going back to college was a way of proving to himself that his intelligence and potential wasn’t confined to his past. Lingering over his degree, too, is Phil’s knowledge that his industry peers witnessed his fall from grace. Through gritted teeth, he tells me that he wants to make up for these mistakes and enter that world again. This time, he would be picking up where he left off, now sober, mature, and bolstered by the academic preparation and distinction that Columbia could give him. Phil explained that a consequence of addic-

tion is that you remain emotionally stunted at the age you start using. At Columbia, Phil turns this into a good thing: He feels he has the maturity of a 23-year-old, which makes him approach the classroom environment with a youthful abandon and an open mind. Gone are nearly all traces of Phil’s former centrism, thanks to a riveting sociopolitical atmosphere that challenged his beliefs. Although he remains firmly opposed to Marxism, Phil says that Columbia has converted him, in the words of his family, into a certified snowflake. MARIO

met Mario in my creative writing class. He is the oldest person there, and probably the most

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY talkative. Mario sits in the front of the class, next to our professor; he asks thoughtful questions, he contemplates the material unpretentiously, and isn’t afraid to open up to the class. A few weeks ago, he told us that he had reached his 12th anniversary of sobriety. Surrounded by strangers, he expressed a profound pride at overcoming the alcoholism his father and grandfather had passed down. Mario told me in private that his decision to get sober was due to “grace from God.” In a drunken tirade one night, he professed to the sky a need for help (fashion photographers have a flair for the dramatic). And lo and behold, help appeared, in the guise of a man sitting behind him. The stranger was an alcoholic too, and was currently completing a 12-step program. Did Mario want to come with him to a meeting? Mario is now 41, sober, and ready to share his journey with the younger students in his class. Growing up, school was a matter of socialializing—joking around with his classmates, learning about other people. He had a hard time engaging in course material. Once in a while, Mario still feels that he isn’t really cut out for school. He occasionally still feels like the poor kid from East Brooklyn, and finds himself wondering if academia is too self-congratulatory. But when he forces himself to go to honors ceremonies, he relishes the accolades. He’s showing himself that he can be an honors student at 41, and that he could have been at 20, too. Years in fashion photography makes Mario very personable, easily winning friends across GS and CC with his wide smile. So while Mario still interprets his position in school as a social experience, he does so in a different way. Now, instead of serving to entertain others, he feels he is in a position where he can mentor others. He can relate to the CC students who are struggling—with their coursework, with their personal lives—and shares the wisdom he’s picked up inside and outside the academy. Before, Mario had always felt as if his life had been a collection of things that had just happened to him. Photography picked him, as if by chance. Alcoholism was embedded in his genetic chart. Even sobriety, to him, was simply the stars aligning. Education is, perhaps, Mario’s first deliberate choice.

MARCH 2022

BILL

ill’s mom told him that he would never go back to school. He assured her he would. At 58, Bill is taking introductory classes towards a second bachelor’s degree. His first degree, in computer science, set him up for a decades-long career as a software engineer—but physics has always been his true passion. Before enrolling in GS, he had been trying to teach himself the material through textbooks and Brian Greene’s lectures on Youtube. But he decided he needed a classroom and a professor to fully master the material. Bill is still working full time while taking one class per semester, meaning that it might take him at least another six years to complete his degree. He says it’s going to be a while before he can meaningfully contribute to new physics research. But he’s not in a hurry. Bill’s college experience the first time around was painfully rushed. He was preoccupied with paying off his car, getting a job. College was a means to a degree, which in turn was a means to a career—all of which needed to be squared away in the shortest possible span of time. GS, for Bill, is a different world, one defined by an appreciation for the entire academic project: the process of learning. In quintessential physics-major fashion, Bill tends to think about time and experience in transcendental terms: He now insists that “academia is more the real world than what they call the real world. It’s actually truly the pursuit of truth, knowledge and understanding.” It doesn’t feel strange to him to be older—he feels like he fits in. He can’t sprint as fast as he used to, and he doesn’t idolize Ronald Reagan anymore, but he’s “young again and back in college.” Bill’s nephew is a sophomore in high school, an athlete who aspires to basketball stardom. Bill doesn’t talk to him too much about college, because he doesn’t want to “chew his ear off.” But the other day, Bill got an email from his sisterin-law: His nephew wanted to study physics, just like him. He hadn’t expected his nephew to be paying so much attention to his experience, assuming the two occupied entirely different realms. Of course, this knowledge makes Bill swell with pride. Wow, he thought, I wonder where that came from.

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

Sharon Marcus

On the stories we tell and the stories we don’t about the women who don’t quite fit in.

BY DOMINY GALLO

n the sliver of Claremont Avenue just north of Milbank, kitty-corner from the Interchurch Center and nestled one block in from Riverside, sits a small building with bay windows. It can only be found by those who already know where it is: denizens of the Department of Religion or Columbia Technology Ventures, whose office PO boxes betray its address, and the attorney named on Google Maps as working (living?) there. Students whose schedules on SSOL read, cryptically, “Claremont,” discovering this not to mean the back-ofBarnard dorm, must walk the avenue in anguish until a kind and knowing stranger points them to the corner of 120th. I was such a student last September, and would never have found my way had not the troupe of eccentrics with whom I would share every Wednesday evening last fall swept me across Broadway and into the clean and airy seminar room on the second floor. There, waiting at the head of a long table, a stack of printed Amy Levy poems at her side, sat Sharon Marcus. Professor Marcus commands a classroom with astonishing elegance and force. She’s the kind of professor who can sift through the rubble of undergraduate inarticulacy and tell you what you would have said could you have thought more clearly. She’s also the rare academic who’s as accomplished a researcher as she is gifted a teacher: She’s written three books on 19th-century Britain and France and, in 2012, co-founded Public Books, a magazine intended “to publish writing that is erudite without being esoteric.” It is this line, so difficult even for even my doctorate-less colleagues on The Blue and White to toe, that Professor Marcus practically dances on. Though English is her field, her work defies departments. Literature, she tells us, offers answers otherwise concealed from historical memory to the question that guides her work: how “people find freedom within restrictive norms and laws.” To this end, it is “the pains and pleasures of gender nonconformity” that Marcus’ students tackle in her most well-known seminar, Odd Women in Victo-

rian England. These titular misfits are women who, to paraphrase from our interview, made women— not men—the central fixtures of their lives and of their politics, in an era when such was anathema. I left the course hungry for more and, from my perch in Oxford, England, I asked her to speak to me about lesbians, literature, and writing a life on the margins. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Content warning: This conversation includes mentions of sexual violence. ··· The Blue and White: Your seminar, Odd Women in Victorian England, is by now the stuff of legend. On the syllabus, you give a long list of characters who fit the description of “odd women”: female outlaws, eccentrics, activists, spinsters, working women, feminists, women who desire other women, people assigned female at birth who live as men. What does it mean to be an odd woman to you, and how did you come to those terms? Sharon Marcus: People thought about Victorians in England as being repressed, uptight, unable to deal with the sexual aspects of human existence, really invested in very rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity. The evidence in the novels I read was that this is a time filled with eccentrics, and people who didn’t marry ever, and people who were really not adhering to norms. I’ve always been struck by this contrast, and I guess we could see it as a tension between the values that society espouses and how people actually live their lives and the many ways they find to get around those values. The 19th century was actually the period where “the homosexual” was invented, with the idea that there’s this type of person who isn’t like the normal heterosexuals and that this is an identity that people were embracing—in the very period where, we were also being told all the time, nobody could even think about sex, they certainly couldn’t think

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N about sex outside procreation, and people thought women had no sexual desires and only had sex as part of pleasing men and being wives and mothers. B&W: What have you learned from the strategies of 19th-century women to carve out spaces of autonomy? SM: We need to really look to that first generation of feminists, the first wave of feminists who come through in the 1840s, to understand both the limitations of feminist movements—and how to move beyond them—and to understand the power of feminist movements. There is a core group of women, around 1848, who decided to change the laws that affected, especially, married women that meant that married women could own no property, that if they earned money it belonged entirely to their husbands, that women who were married when they had children had no rights whatsoever to those children, that the father was the only legal bearer of rights as a parent, that women had no grounds for seeking a divorce except through really, really expensive procedures, so women who were being physically abused by their husbands had no recourse to end those marriages. This group of women came together to do something about that. A surprising number of women who were interested in improving the lots of married women were themselves not married—women who were married to men, as this was a time when the only legal form of marriage was between a man and a woman. Many of these women were in partnerships, romantic partnerships, with other women. Lillian Faderman has written a whole book about this in the United States, called To Believe in Women. It is really remarkable how a number of women we would now call lesbians have really led the way in improving the lives of women, in general. One way to think about odd women is women who, instead of making men central to their lives, which is what the ideology of domesticity said most women should do, made women central to their lives, both personally but also in terms of a larger cause. The other thing I would say I learned from studying odd women is that people will find all kinds of ways to live their truth. Even at a time when there was explicit endorsement of conformity and people who weren’t interested in heterosexuality were pathologized by doctors and scientists and psychologists, people found ways to be who they were. They had a pretty high tolerance, often, of not

MARCH 2022

being able to do this openly. I learned a lot about the centrality not only of education, but something that’s linked to education, although not always, and that’s the ability to work and have some degree of financial independence. When you look at these odd women who, in an era that did not support women being anything but wives and mothers, managed to, like Mary Seacole, become a nurse who traveled around the world, or like Ann Lister, who pursued dozens of affairs with other women, or the schoolteachers in Scotland who ended up involved in a very difficult libel case when they were accused of having sex with each other, or the novelists who wrote about odd women and therefore made odd women more available to other women to identify with—all of these were women who, at a time when it was not encouraged at all for women to work, found paid work, put themselves out into the public sphere, and that was not easy. B&W: We learned that “lesbian” is an anachronistic category when applied to the 19th century, but this is also when that category is being solidified into an identity. Can you speak about the 19th century as a turning point in the history of women’s sexuality? SM: We can trace certain kinds of fascination with women having sex with women all the way back to antiquity. There’s the poetry of Sappho. There are the Satires of Juvenal. Nineteenth-century women use this code when meeting each other to signal that they themselves had sexual interest in women: You’d say, “Hey, have you read the Satires of Juvenal?”, and that would be a way of indicating that you were in the know. What happens in the 19th century is there starts to be a medicalization of sexuality. With the advances in science that are happening and the professionalization of medicine and psychiatry, there’s a lot more interest in documenting people’s sexual practices. It’s a period where people are fascinated with classifications and typologies. There’s the classification of the “invert.” Initially, the discussion of women who were sexually interested in other women was lumped in with men who were sexually interested with other men. People couldn’t really sort out how much of this was identifying with the “opposite gender.” A lot of the people the figures talked about as lesbians, the salient thing that doctors had to say about them was that they seemed masculine. Built into this is the assumption of a baseline heterosexuality:

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N that to be masculine is to be interested in women. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, has written powerfully about how everything that seemed to stigmatize same-sex eroticism also created more opportunities for it. So as people became more familiar with all this medical discourse about pathological deviance, it was a way of learning, Oh, I have options—there’s a name for what I feel. It didn’t have only a discouraging effect, it also had an encouraging effect. Most of the women you looked at in my class did not feel very affected by any of these classifications, these technologies. Medical discourse can emerge, but it takes a lot for that medical discourse to actually impinge on people’s lives. Already, in the 19th century, a lot of women who were questioning gender codes and sexual morays were skeptical of the medical profession and how it talked about gender and sexuality. B&W: Although so much of what you do could likely be termed cultural history, you are in the English department. So, what about literature? What is it that literature can do, particularly in articulating woman–woman eroticism, that these other discourses can’t—or didn’t? SM: Literature has a lot of means at its disposal for talking about emotions, for talking about desires, for talking about how people interpret the values that they’re handed. Literature doesn’t have to traffic in the explicit, so there’s a lot of room to talk about things in ways that can bypass various modes of censorship, or that can bypass taboos on saying things explicitly. For the first week of our class, we read a short excerpt from a book by Michael Lucey about French literature called Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities from Colette to Hervé Guibert. What he was particularly concerned about in that book is how people feel excluded, even from communities set up for the outcast. There’s something about community and identity that creates exclusion as well as inclusion, and he looks at people who felt like outliers even within queer communities. He wrote an earlier book called Never Say I, which is a quote from Marcel Proust. Famously, his multivolume Remembrance of Things Past is a book in which pretty much everyone turns out to be engaged in same-sex eroticism. This is at a time when same-sex acts weren’t criminalized in France, but they were stigmatized. Proust said, Eh, you can write about whatever you want, so long as you never say “I.” So there’s something about indirection,

elusiveness, the way that in literature you can work out something personal through characters who are not you. One of the authors we read at the beginning of the semester from the 19th century who points to a really interesting example of what literature can do is the poet Amy Levy, who died quite young from suicide. She uses the form of the lyric poem and the way that a speaker can say “I” and not be completely gendered to write all these poems about her love of women, about being at a dinner party where the speaker is making contact with another woman in public. It’s almost an allegory of what literature can do, which is bring things into public that are extremely private in ways that are allusive, coded, indirect. Something can have multiple meanings that aren’t necessarily that pinned down, and it’s up to the reader to find all those meanings. That means that the writer is absolved of the responsibility of saying them. B&W: There’s a paper you wrote in the ’90s, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in which you argue that rape is a language. This is a strategy, you say, to push back on the imagination of women as inherently rapeable or in some way already raped. Tell me more. SM: In writing that paper, I especially leaned on the concept of a script. Rape is all about depriving women of agency, but I felt when I wrote that piece that what we now call “rape culture” created a certain kind of hopelessness around this. There is actually very little research on the many, many women who were in a situation where someone was trying to rape them and they succeeded in stopping that from happening. Of course, I was really concerned, in writing this, not to in any way make it seem like a woman who couldn’t prevent a rape from happening was somehow at fault. But it just felt like there was a different way to think about the problem that shifted away from, How do we address this in courts? (And again, I value all that work that got done to change the laws.) A lot of the literature at the time was, How can we make the ways that these cases get tried less prejudicial towards the women who were the victims here? I was really interested in the actual situations that women found themselves in and what could be done there. I was writing this right around the time that the concept of date rape was becoming popular-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Illustration by Amelie Scheil

ized. For a long time, the image of rape in people’s minds—what counted as “a rape” in quotes—was a very violent assault. If a woman had been basically coerced into having sex against her will without being violently assaulted, that was not considered a rape. I talked to a lot of people about their experiences, I would read about what people said about situations where they had been raped or someone tried to rape them, and it seemed like so often women just felt unable to take action on their own behalf. Women felt very, very disempowered. And it wasn’t just because they felt physically weak, which isn’t always the case—it was just a sense of not feeling entitled to defend ourselves against someone making demands on us, or trying to coerce us, or bullying us into doing what they wanted that we didn’t want. In thinking about that as a script, I was really interested in how we internalize a certain set of behaviors and values that affect what we think we can and can’t do—and what it would take to change that. Some of what it seemed it would take to change that is simply saying, we’re allowed to act on our own behalves and we’re allowed to think, first and foremost, do I want to do this? No, I don’t want to

MARCH 2022

do this. So I’m going to behave badly, I’m going to behave in ways that I’ve been taught are rude, unacceptable, excessive. If I’d been a philosopher, I might have written it as a paper about personal phenomenology, because I was just very aware of how disempowered I felt in my body to even say something as simple as “Hey, fuck off, you’re really getting on my nerves. I don’t want to go out with you.” It just felt like as a gender, women were taught to put others before ourselves, to please other people. Therefore, there’s this incredibly heavy lift to asserting what we did and didn’t want in a situation where there’s some kind of conflict around sex. That seemed, to me, the result of the stories we’re exposed to and the scripts we see, and how we internalize them as blueprints for our own behavior. B&W: You are living and working in a university setting, and sexual violence is a huge problem on college campuses. To the point that you’re making about us imbibing cultural scripts, I’ve been thinking about what English classes are teaching me, and teaching the men at my side, about how women behave sexually, how we should behave sexually, how we should be treated sexually. It’s rather disheartening. As an academic, knowing the statistics

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N about how many women, nonbinary, and trans students will graduate having been assaulted or raped in the four years of university: What is academia doing to enable this? SM: About 10 years ago, I was on the committee for the GRE Literature in English Test—the committee that comes up with passages and questions. The first meeting, we were reviewing a bunch of passages and questions that people had come up with, and at least half of the passages had something to do with sexual violence, because there’s so much poetry that’s about sexual violence and there’s so much literature that’s about sexual violence. I remember saying, “I think we need to think about how people are going to respond to this. It’s a Saturday morning, they’re already in a stressful situation taking an exam, and you’re putting in all these questions that—I think we can safely assume that at least half the people taking the test have been sexually assaulted—and then they have to grapple with this material? There is actually English literature that is not all about rape; maybe we could foreground that more.” It didn’t make me a popular member of the committee. As is often the case with academics, their initial response was to really push back and argue with me, but then I did notice that in subsequent years, we managed to find a lot of passages from literary texts that weren’t exclusively about rape. But what’s also interesting is how easy it was. I don’t think anyone in the years before it was deliberately gravitating towards questions about rape. I really think that much of our literature reflects, as you’re saying—your cat looks a lot like mine! Except my cat is deeply asleep. B&W: Sorry, she was yelling at me from the foot of my bed. She wanted to come. SM: Is she a Bombay? Oh, she has a little white, too; my cat’s all black. B&W: Yeah. She’s a rescue. We love her very much, and the dog is now angling for her attention. So sorry to interrupt. SM: That’s okay. But the fact that this situation even arose points to how much of our literature is about sexual violence and perpetuates ideas about women being sexually available—if they’re not sexually available, they’re bad; if they are sexually available, they’re bad. The majority of literature that’s in the canon is a male perspective that celebrates a heedless version of masculinity that just revels in its own power, is resentful of women who

resist male power as just an impediment to this grandiose male subjectivity. You have to, in some ways, inhabit your own subjective position and let it run riot, but I think good literature, the best literature, shows the awareness of the limitations of one’s own perspective and it’s about trying to enter the perspectives of others. The answer to your question, What can we do in teaching literature? You have to be really, really sensitive to what people’s experiences are. If we’re going to teach a work that represents sexual violence … we need to acknowledge that it does that. We need to treat that as not necessarily a bug but a feature. We have to take seriously that this might say something really important about the worldview of the person writing it. When I teach, I ask myself, How important is it that I teach this text? This text, as opposed to another. I’m always making choices—I can never teach everything worth reading. And if I do teach it, do I think I’m going to be able to have a conversation about it that helps us reach a better understanding of whatever traumatic, difficult, criminal experience it might be recounting? Or is this text too compromised in its understanding of sexual violence, sex work, sexuality—I mean, the list goes on—for it really to be what I’m going to ask us to spend our precious time on? I’ve tried teaching Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles a few times. Hardy is a really great writer, he expresses a lot of sympathy for Tess. But the novel depicts a scene that is written in such a way that students always end up debating whether she was “actually” raped, or did she just give in— and I feel that the way he depicts it is part of rape culture. And I got tired of having that conversation. I felt that it was really, really hard, in the context of a lecture class, to have to teach this text in a way that advanced students’ understanding of sexual violence. I think in a seminar about rape culture and the complicity of literature in rape culture, that it would be essential that I teach Tess of the d’Urbervilles. B&W: You told me after class one evening, in your fabulous red leather coat, that you were editing a new edition of Jane Eyre. I’d love to know more about this. You mentioned you’d read it dozens of times; how has it been revisiting the text? What will be new about this edition? It must be an enormous undertaking. SM: This was a new edition of Jane Eyre for the

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Norton Critical Editions, which are an attempt to offer an affordable US-based alternative to Penguin and Oxford World Classics. The main work I had to do was to figure out how to introduce the book to a reader who was reading it for the first time. It was hard for me to imagine what it would be like to have never read it, as I’ve been teaching it for 30 years and I think I first read it when I was around 11 years old. It’s a book that’s very close to my heart, but—to return to some themes from earlier in the conversation—it’s a book that also we can use to chart the development of feminist criticism and the awareness in feminist criticism of the limitations of a perspective that’s exclusively white or exclusively Anglo. To me, it was, first and foremost, a chance to present to an audience how to think about the feminist implications of the text and what it means to be a feminist reader. The main thing that was a new kind of task, though, was annotating the text and figuring out what merits a footnote, what doesn’t—what can I assume people to know, what can’t I?—and doing that in the age of Google. I decided that if I saw a word I didn’t know, and I put it into Google, and the first meaning that came up was the correct one, then I didn’t need to annotate that. I can just assume that readers today are as likely to Google a term as they are to click on the footnote within the text and see my definition of it. But then if, for example, Brontë used an obscure term to describe the color of someone’s eyes that happens to also be the name of a very popular bottled water, I needed to annotate it, because if you Google that term, you’re just going to be sifting through a lot of sponsored blog posts about bottled water. B&W: What is it about Jane that is so captivating? Is she, in fact, your favorite Brontë character? SM: I prefer Lucy Snowe because she’s even more recalcitrant and unusual than Jane. One of the things that I like is that I find a lot of people don’t particularly like Charlotte Brontë and don’t particularly like Jane Eyre. They find them stubborn, rigid, too determined to stick to their own set of values at any cost—and that’s exactly what I like about them. I like that there’s a certain refusal to compromise, and I also like that there’s a stubborn practicality, particularly to Jane. She writes a lot about food and whether the room is warm or cold—she’s in her body, she’s in touch with her bodily needs, in touch with her needs, in general.

MARCH 2022

There’s a forthrightness with which Jane Eyre says, “I need to love and be loved,” that it’s very, very rare to find a 19th-century female character saying, or a female novelist articulating through any of her female characters. There’s also a defiance to Jane Eyre. One of the pivotal scenes, early on, is when she speaks out against the injustice that she feels her aunt has visited upon her. [Jane and Lucy] are beleaguered characters, for whom it’s not easy to take a stand, but they do it. They go along feeling resentful for a while and then they burst out with a really strong articulation of what they see as unjust or unfair, what needs to change, or even just how they feel, and I like that. There’s a combination of being very down to earth and being that kind of crazy romantic that I find very appealing. B&W: I mentioned the red leather coat. I want to know the story. SM: There’s always so many stories with all beloved items of clothing. It’s a Courrèges coat, and my main association with Courrèges is that it’s what Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac wear in the movie Les Desmoiselles de Rochefort. It’s a very mid-1960s brand that’s kind of mod and supposed to be evoking space-age aesthetics: streamlined, but also bold colors, usually one block of color, maybe a little piping in white, usually. In 2011, I was doing research at Ohio State University in their theatre archives for my book on celebrity in the 19th century. They had an exhibit from their collections that included exhibits of clothing, and there was this amazing pleather, actually, orange trench coat with white piping. I took a picture of it and showed it to my partner and I told her, ‘Oh my god, I love this coat, I wish I could find some way to get this coat.’ And for my birthday in 2018, she went on eBay and she found the coat. B&W: That’s so sweet. SM: She was dealing with very advanced recurrence of cancer at the time, and she died before my next birthday, so that was also the last birthday present she got me. B&W: Oh, I’m so sorry. SM: It’s something that’s important to talk about. Death is a part of people’s lives. It’s one of these things, even more than sex … people really still have a hard time talking about. And I’m a big believer in talking about things. I guess that’s why I like outspoken Jane Eyre. She doesn’t believe in keeping too much to herself.

HUMOR

Dear Dante

Season 8

BY MICHAEL COLTON your immediate circle, Senior Scramble wasn’t your only shot. Personally, I find most of my partners either through Raya (I was personally invited to join by Maggie Gyllenhaal), or campus organizations like “Perfect!” which meets in secret every week above Sweetgreen and is open to anyone who has either been offered a Parade micro-sponsorship or a spot on the fencing team. If neither of those avenues are accessible (you would already know if they were), then disregard everything in this paragraph other than the fact that I know Maggie Gyllenhaal on an intimate level. In all seriousness, you really shouldn’t be too worried about making things weird with the people you’re trying to scheme. The anonymity of Senior Scramble is great for protecting your dignity, but there’s nothing hotter than owning your sexuality, and not being afraid to act on it. Even more important to keep in mind is that it’s the end of college, and there’s really nothing to lose by shooting your shot, even with someone you know. Don’t worry about making things weird with your advance or scaring people off with your obvious lack of experience, because your close friends are already all planning to move to Brooklyn without you next year—they told me at the Perfect! meeting last week. Anyway, this is all to say that you’ve got to work to make it work, even if that means feigning the confidence and desirability needed to do so. And I think you’d be pleasantly surprised at how many of the people in your life are thinking of you in the same way. Some of them are probably even in betting pools about the likelihood of you getting laid by the end of the year, so don’t be afraid to go for it.

Illustration by Hart Hallos

Dear Dante, I missed the deadline for Senior Scramble, and now I feel like I missed my chance at getting *quality time* with some long-time schemes, a couple of whom are close friends of mine. I don’t want to let it slide since all of my friends are already meeting up with their matches, but I’m also afraid of getting rejected or making things weird with friends or acquaintances by going for it. How should I approach my own personal scramble? –CC ’22

Dear INCEL, I’ve certainly been in your shoes before, hoping to seal the deal before the clock runs out. The difference is that, historically, my partners have come looking for my bedroom with the fervor of British soldiers seeking short-term residence in 18th-century Boston, whereas you seem quite pressed for options. Nevertheless, I understand what you’re going through, as I’m quite familiar with your type (super horny). With the end of your college career approaching, and (I assume) a Latter Day Saints’-level of casual open mouth kissing in your past, it’s totally natural to be seeking out a bit of fun before you leave campus. The difficulty comes in (a) finding partners that are willing to be intimate with someone whose go-to move for getting laid is to write to a campus advice columnist, and (b) making sure that you don’t ruin friendships with your lack of game. Let’s start with the challenge of finding a hookup. You say that you’ve got some friends in mind that you’ve been eyeing for a while—that’s great. To a potential partner, nothing is more seductive than knowing that you’ve been silently hot for them for the entirety of your friendship. So, to start, you should subtly indicate your longstanding interest in them. It’s best to do so casually, maybe through an Instagram DM about how they looked cute today in their overalls (just a guess), or a text message saying something sweet like “I’ve never actually thought of you as a friend as much as someone I’d like to one day have low-effort sex with.” Best of luck, If you’re looking to expand your options beyond Dante

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MARCH 2022 For more yassified administrators, visit our website.

Stations of the Cross BY CY GILMAN ACROSS 1. Obnoxious jerk 4. Spec mask pieces 9. Her accompaniment, in introductions 12. Cabbage for stir fry, say 14. Like the noughties revival now, somehow 15. Art Hum's Trompe l’____ 16. October birthstone 17. *Take the 7 to the Winter Village* 19. 1960’s civil rights org. 21. GIF, e.g. 22. Observes the Sabbath 23. Columbia composer Georg Friedrich 25. Element that gets bent 26. *Take the Q to Little Odessa* 32. Tool for when the suite needs a clean 33. Accompaniment to a tequila shot 34. Chess ranking system 37. How one might feel when feverish 38. Kreyòl-speaking country 40. Stretched stiff 41. NYC railway letters, and a hint to this puzzle’s starred clues 42. Othello plotter 43. Showing school spirit 45. *Take the 3 all the way East* 48. School for nerds outside Boston 49. “Put ____ on it” 50. Releases, as an album 53. It makes up the Seine 55. Seemingly irrelevant Roku app 58. *Take the 1 to see Lady Liberty* 61. Quantitative information 63. Like cookies with raisins 64. “In this paper, I _____” 65. The Blue and White, for instance, from March 2020 to April 2021, for short 66. Port Huron Statement grp. 67. Get a third vax, slangily

68. Emissions of ambivalence DOWN 1. Doce meses 2. Drains 3. Range of time 4. Planetary shape 5. Motto for academics: “Publish or ______” 6. Word origin, abbr. 7. King's or queen’s attire 8. Trinity third 9. School whose degrees are B.S.? 10. Al of trumpet fame 11. Order that congregates in a Grand Lodge 13. Frontier of Science? 15. Genre for Carmen or Grimes? 18. Dakota or Delaware 20. Someone between a soldier and a consigliere 24. Pothole filler 25. Ackbar’s title 26. Took a test to graduate, say 27. Hundred: Prefix 28. Wharton’s Frome

29. “April is the cruelest month” author 30. Island in the Thames 31. Pine, long 35. Hawaiian do 36. Will-wisp filler 39. In the past 40. Namesake of The Big Lebowski 42. “If only...” 44. New Yorker writer Rachel 46. Like a college parent’s nest 47. How most dinosaurs end? 50. Awards for RAF pilots 51. I took the one less traveled 52. There are six in an inning 53. Saarinen who designed the Chapel at 48A 54. Jason’s boat 56. Anna Wintour or Olivia de Havilland, for example 57. State originally founded as Deseret 59. Part of a “Queer Eye” nickname 60. Be that as it may 62. Sessions and Garland, for two, abbr.